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Dangerous Sons

Some time back I blogged on Hotness in Hollywood. In it I gave Angeline Jolie props for making a game effort at acting in a a movie with a script so execrable that her best effort was doomed, the original Tomb Raider movie. I also praised Liv Tyler playing Arwen, who became my personal all-time favorite example of screen sexiness in the Lord Of The Rings movies. And yes, I know this means I’m a geek; that’s not news to anybody.

My wife Cathy and I saw Wanted last night. Avoid it if you can’t stand the sight of people being shot through the head; otherwise it’s a fun popcorn movie with lots of implausible but extremely well-choreographed ultraviolence. (Well, OK, I started to giggle during the last knife fight a few minutes before the ending, because with the Marine knife-fighting technique my swordmaster taught my wife and I last year either of us could have filleted those two pirouetting idiots in short order.)

There was a moment in this movie at which Liv Tyler got toppled off her perch as my ultimate icon of cinematic sexiness. It was Angelina Jolie playing Fox the assassin, in tight clothing, standing alert and challenging, with a pistol slung low on her hip, looking like she damn well knew how to use it.

That went straight to my hypothalamus — bells ringing, lights flashing, rrrowwwrrr!. And, you know, the pistol was important. It trumped Arwen’s sword.

For me, at least, sexy women are sexier when they are obviously lethally dangerous. But Lara Croft didn’t affect me as strongly as Fox, despite being twice as heavily armed. I think it’s because Lara Croft was more of a cartoon, obviously bust-padded and stuck in a premise and script I had much more trouble believing. I got the stronger charge from a woman who seemed sexy, and lethal, and (at that moment) real.

OK, so why am I going on about my sexual quirks? Because I think there’s some sort of more general point here, and I think the politics and sociobiology of it is kind of interesting. The filmmakers were obviously working hard at maximizing the joint sexiness and dangerousness of Jolie’s character, and it is doubtful they’d have bothered without a pretty clear notion that a lot of men would respond to it the same way I did. At the very least they had to believe it’s a majority preference, otherwise Jolie getting seriously jiggy with firearms would repel more men than it attracted and depress their audience share.

This is implicitly a rebuke to a certain kind of feminist — the kind that believes in a vast male conspiracy to keep women disempowered. If a man of quality is defined by his not feeling threatened by a woman’s equality ability to blow his fucking head off, the filmmakers were clearly betting money on the proposition that more than 50% of their male audience would likely fit that bill.

And this actually makes evolutionary sense, I think. I’m reminded of what sociobiologists call the Sexy Son hypothesis. According to this one, women are attracted to handsome sexy men because they believe those men will give them handsome sexy sons with an above-average ability to pass on mama’s genes.

Contemplating Angeline Jolie as Fox in this movie, I propose the Dangerous Sons hypothesis. That is: more than 50% of men want to jump lethally dangerous women because they think those women will give them dangerous sons with an above-average ability to pass on papa’s genes.

“But wait…” I hear you say. “Why not a Dangerous Daughters hypothesis? Could our instincts be aimed at making women better fighters and hunters too?”

Er, probably not. In the ancestral environment, female reproductive capacity was way too scarce a resource to be hazarded in combat. Short lifespans, the minimum of nine months between pregnancies, and a high rate of death in childbirth made sure of that. Furthermore, womens’ lighter build and lesser upper body strength meant that (with very rare exceptions at the top end of the female bell curve) women could simply never expect to win a serious fight against a male of even average strength.

(Pre-gunpowder weapons like swords could reduce the disparity some but not eliminate it. Gunpowder weapons eliminate it almost entirely. But in the ancestral environment that shaped human mating instincts, we had neither.)

So the sexiest possible presentation for a woman is to appear capable of bearing dangerous sons while also being smart and cautious enough that her daughters are unlikely to habitually take the sorts of stupid chances that more expendable males can.

I think this explains why Fox is sexier than Lara Croft. A dangerous man can take the kind of crazy, cartoony chances Lara Croft did without his genetic predispositions tipping over into being a net liability for his genetic line (close kin), but a dangerous woman has to be cooler. More measured. More competent. More real.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go kiss my wife…

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10 thoughts on “Dangerous Sons”

I saw Wanted too — and Angelina Jolie still doesn’t do it for me, especially now that she borders on skeletal. Beyond that there’s something contrived about her on-screen presence these days that detracts from her appeal; she was easily at her sexiest in Hackers.

Modern gunpowder weapons reduce the physical-power discrepancy between the sexes, but do not eliminate it. In general, men can carry and wield larger and more powerful firearms than women. Firearms makers produce weapons designed for women that are lighter and have less recoil.

With early firearms this was even more true: a 16th-century musket or caliver was a massive thing.

Having said that – a gun is still an equalizer. Even the smallest women can handle a gun capable of killing the biggest man.

>I suspect that ESR is referring to something other than physical ability.

Total combat effectiveness. The difference between ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ firearms doesn’t really signify that much unless you’re talking massed fire on a battlefield and fighters using cover or body armor; in individual fights, it’s really all about shot placement, not the weight or velocity of the bullet.

I think Hollywood has found a temporary solution to their problem of “We need ass kicking heroes who can finish a movie story arc in 100 minutes or less.” and “We can’t show men doing anything aggressive unless they’re Bad Guys or Comic Relief.”

Eventually, there will come a break when “male hero” isn’t “self referential parody”. I might even still be watching movies then.

However, notice that even in LoTR, which is about as gender equal in its source material as the Old Testament:

1) The competent one of the Big Three is Lego-my-ass. And the only way to describe him is “pretty”.
2) The most overtly masculine character of the Big Three is Gimli. Who is relegated to comic relief.
3) Aragorn is mostly upstaged by his girlfriend (Arwen, who has two emotions – pouty and angst) and the woman who has a crush on him (Eowyn). And they pretty much had to merge three characters to get enough stuff for Arwen to do between “Angst! Elven Angst!” moments. (Calling down the waves is Caleborn’s one scene in Fellowship…).

In terms of Jolie: I find her to be too much plastic, too little person to find her attractive. Her roles have gotten increasingly “masculine” as she’s had more surgeries and lost some of the mobility in her face as a result. It’s easier to do a smirk with collagen-enhanced smirk and Botox to hide the lines than it is to do the subtler transitions of actual emotion.

At some point, the Butt Kickin’ Femme Star is going to become as self referentially parodic as Rambo is. Then Hollywood will have a problem.